Staten Island is 100 square miles large — a third bigger than all of Washington DC.

It has 470,000 residents — the same as all of Sacramento.

So as reports began emerging from folks like Anderson Cooper that Hurricane Sandy had wreaked havoc on the island ("Cop on Staten Island tells me 'it's chaos here. It's bad'" he Tweeted Friday), we tried to rush over there.

We figured we could simply hop on a bus and get off anywhere, and the destruction would be all around us.

It turns out that's not the case.

Electricity was flowing through most of the isald, and whatever roads may have been impassible had been cleared.

Most bars and restaurants were open.

Despite the gas shortage, taxis and car services were up and running.

Even the Staten Island railway, which runs fairly close to the coast, had begun operating again by Saturday.

It ended up taking us about two hours to make it to the coast, where the real damage was. And the only reason we made it was that the middle of the island was so clear that bus lines were running unimpeded.

But when we finally made it to Crescent Beach, the scale of the damage was total.